


Vinyl Advice: Stop, Look, Listen.

by mockturtletale



Series: Vinyl Advice: [1]
Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: M/M, Music AU, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-09
Updated: 2011-09-09
Packaged: 2017-10-25 02:24:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/270696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mockturtletale/pseuds/mockturtletale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Music is Harvey’s home.</p><p>When he listens to records that he loves, he feels like the purest, truest form of himself. Without distraction, the whole world a distant footnote, Harvey can think. He slips into songs like others crawl between their sheets at night, safe from all else at last.</p><p>The only thing that would make it better, he knows, is finding someone who fits there with him. Harvey doesn’t think about it too much. Harvey is a realist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vinyl Advice: Stop, Look, Listen.

**Notes** : Written for [this prompt](http://suitsmeme.livejournal.com/3323.html?thread=3766011#t3766011) in the [Suits Kink Meme](http://suitsmeme.livejournal.com/). Wholly and always for my bff Taelor.

 

  
Music referenced:

  
[{Mix 1}](http://www.mediafire.com/?z6eqbt1jot6xzn9)  
1 - [Bloc Party ; Vision of Heaven](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDiBjN9y1Ro).  
2 - [Nico ; These Days](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_z_UEuEMAo).  
3 - [Modest Mouse ; Float On](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOihao61dv0&feature=related).  
4 - [We Were Promised Jetpacks ; It's Thunder and It's Lightning](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6shmJaOD3Q).  
5 - [Brand New ; Sic Transit Gloria (Glory Fades)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOHg1rKzWuE)  
6 - [The Receiving End Of Sirens ; Planning A Prison Break](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRkBL9nejpk&ob=av2n).  
7 - [Switchfoot ; Stars](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYpUGHOZI8A).  
8 - [Band Of Horses ; The Funeral](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPW8y6woTBI).  
9 - [Abandoned Pools ; The Remedy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrsLYFTpy1Q).

 

______________________________________________

 

 

[{Mix 2}](http://www.mediafire.com/?4z577bclx5toa6t)  
1 - [Empires ; Strangers](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z1Y0FpoHxg).  
2 - [Modest Mouse ; Satin in a Coffin](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEPviNo1tjc).  
3 - [Ratatat ; Nostrand](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCdQhhaP_ms).  
4 - [Empires ; Voodooized](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmkH8hWNi1s).  
5 - [Animal Collective ; Did You See The Words](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXfwc0RDHBQ).  
6 - [Wild Beasts ; Two Dancers II](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIyqt2OZ-qc).

  
_____________________________________________________

  
Otherwise:  
1 - [Red Hot Chili Peppers ; If You Want Me To Stay](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfIUQYlmOeY).

2 - [Sly and the Family Stone ; If You Want Me To Stay](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wOaaBCYRVg).

3 - [Digitalism ; Pogo (shinichi osawa rmx)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baDncBFyCDU)

[](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baDncBFyCDU)

 

____________________________________________________

 

 

 

 

  
Harvey was an unfocused, agitated child. It was as though his skin and bones were constantly thrumming with a shaking force that he could do nothing to quell and after confessing his nature to his mother and finding the flood fueled hot and itching by her absolute lack of comprehension, he decided it for the best to keep his struggle to himself. His mother had enough to deal with as it was, and nothing made it stop, nothing could make him still. This was not down to a lack of effort on Harvey’s part.

And eventually his perseverance paid off.

Finally tall enough to disobey a direct order and reach up to pull down a folding ladder that leads to the only real wealth of unexplored territory this house could still boast, eleven year old Harvey unearthed treasure and relief, stacked low along the entire length of the attic floor, weighed against a far less forgotten still functional turn table. Dust covered cardboard and thin paper bracketing concentric grooves that Harvey didn’t yet know would come to set him right, needle to vinyl the conductor of his electrostatic charge.

Stiff and aging floorboards had groaned under his weight as he walked the line to pick through his find. Selecting the thick lip of a double record that caught heavier underneath his trailing fingertips, Harvey had slid the LP from its cover without looking, and eased it into place, lifting and dropping the tone arm with a reverence he couldn’t place but could neither refuse.

At eleven years old, Harvey had sat folded into a dark corner of his attic and breathed in stale air and religion. At eleven years old, Harvey listened to the b-side of Sam Cooke’s 1964 album ‘Ain’t That Good News’ and heard God.

 

  
___________________________________

 

 

  
Music is Harvey’s home.

When he listens to records that he loves, he feels like the purest, truest form of himself. Without distraction, the whole world a distant footnote, Harvey can think. He slips into songs like others crawl between their sheets at night, safe from all else at last.

The only thing that would make it better, he knows, is finding someone who fits there with him. Harvey doesn’t think about it too much. Harvey is a realist.

 

 

_______________________________________

 

 

  
There’s a record store half a block away from the Pearson Hardman offices that Harvey discovered by accident on his way home one evening back when he was a junior associate and had to walk. It’s called ‘Criminal Records’, playing on the fact that it’s the only retail unit in a solid mile of what is by and large corporate office space. Harvey would find the name in poor taste, were it not for the fact that this building is beyond the realm of flaw, he’s sure. In a city that rises sharp in steel and glass, Criminal Records is a gentle but hulking giant of high ceilings and moulded marble pillars and sweeping spiral staircases that bridge three floors of the best vinyl selection Harvey has ever found, lined with plush red velvet carpet and patterned wallpaper peeling from every wall. It’s completely out of place on this block, in this city, in this era. It’s the only space Harvey has ever found that settles him almost as much as sound.

 

  
__________________________________________

 

 

  
And in a dark dark store on a dark dark night, there is Mike.

 

 

  
_____________________________________

 

 

  
Harvey only knows his name because he has read it on his name tag. Criminal Records opens until midnight Monday through Thursday and until 2am otherwise and every night at 5pm Mike arrives for his shift. But Harvey can only speculate that it’s every night, because he can only visit the store two or three times a week and no matter when those reprieves fall, there is Mike. Harvey doesn’t speak to him, but he feels like he knows him anyway, like he recognizes something in Mike’s face when the record on the store’s sound system changes that he might find himself in a mirror. Harvey can only find time to visit the store two or three times a week. But every evening he spends sealed up in his office, above the fray, 5pm finds him at his window. Mike has worked at Criminal Records for four months and three days. Harvey could pick him out in a crowd from five floors above street level after six days.

 

 

  
___________________________________________

 

 

  
Unbeknownst to Harvey, his attention is not unrequited. His interest is returned in equal measure, although Mike doesn’t realize it’s a matter of equilibrium, doesn’t think to even entertain the idea that ‘The Suit’ sees him too. He doesn’t like to think about it at all, not in those terms, because his workmates’ term of endearment needs a lot of work and makes Mike cringe. Mike works the night shift because his schedule doesn’t really make all that much difference in an otherwise futile, patchwork existence and he is more or less his own boss in the evenings when shift managers can and do choose to live full fulfilling lives elsewhere. Mike is wasted here and everyone knows it, even Harvey, who has said ‘thank you’ to Mike eleven times now and looked at him during each and every one of these occasions like Mike was supposed to hear more than that. Mike doesn’t know what he isn’t listening hard enough to pick up, but it keeps him awake in the early mornings and water logged in dreams in the late afternoons. Sleep doesn’t soothe Mike like it should, anyway. Music does, but only sometimes. It’s his one true love, his only love, and it translates the world around him into something Mike can see. His mind works in ways that it shouldn’t and thinking rubs his nerves raw on days he isn’t here, in the store, in this. Different songs, different artists, different albums fit him like a wardrobe of clothing and it’s his primary concern, a daily necessity. Once upon a time he thought he’d found someone who understood that. But they’d taken things from him that weren’t his or theirs to keep and now he doesn’t know how to share again.

 

 

_________________________________________

 

 

  
On the fourth day of the fifth month Mike has worked at Criminal Records, they each finally find reason to try.

 

 

___________________________________________

 

 

  
When Harvey pushes open the heavy old gold gilded glass door, sound envelops him like a warm hug. He always feels at home here, but this ….

“This is Joy Division.”

Mike looks up from where he’s idly designing crude album artwork on the back of receipts at the register and The Suit is blinking up at him. Having just spoken to him. About Joy Divison.

“Uh .. yeah. My shift manager left early so I’ve got free reign of the stereo.”

Mike grins.

“You chose this? Are you … were you even born when this record was released?”

But it’s delivered with teasing tone, offered up like sweet bait and Mike doesn’t need incentive to bite.

“Sadly, the world had another seven years to wait before I, the last hope for mankind, would be born. And you were - what - one year old? Already a budding music critic?”

Harvey matches Mike’s grin with a blinding display of his own then, and Mike is instantly thankful to the Chinese place around the corner for giving Jenny food poisoning, because this is already the best shift he’s ever not been scheduled to work.

“I was four, actually.”

And then he’s gone before Mike has a chance to try and think up a witty response, wandering between the aisles like he has nowhere else to be.

Mike does nothing so obvious as tracking his movements through the store, but he feels half aware of his presence at all times anyway, and isn’t surprised when he arrives back in front of him, record in hand.

He rings up ‘Disintegration’ by The Cure, thinks what a coincidence it is that this record was released the year _he_ was four years old, and doesn’t register the “goodnight, Mike” until he’s alone again and wondering.

Mike and Harvey both fall asleep that night listening to the song ‘Lullaby’ from that LP.

 

  
_______________________________________________________

 

 

 

The very next night Mike is working again, eating his dinner (which consists of overcooked noodles) while he flips through this month’s issue of Spin. He’s listening to The xx tonight and everything feels fluid, time sleek and his thoughts a soothing ebb and flow.

“Was I wrong about you? Are you a victim of your generation’s drug addled club scene that just happened to have one accidentally correct music opinion?”

He looks up and The Suit is back. Two nights in a row is unusual. A pleasant surprise.

“Excuse me?”

“Last night you were listening to Joy Division. Tonight it’s this. Or are you the victim of rank here? Are you being supressed, Mike? I’m a lawyer, I can help you.”

And The Suit, Mike is delighted to found, has within the space of two days, unfurled like a flower. A sharp, witty flower that can seemingly go from nought to sixty in one day and turn four months of polite, minimal exchanges into what Mike already finds to be a comfortable, easy trade of challenge. A venus flytrap, maybe.

“I appreciate that, but I’m listening to this of my own free will, I’m afraid. Have I disappointed you?”

The Suit is silent for a moment, considering.

“Well, I suppose this is the point at which I have to make a decision. To trust in your judgement or not?”

“Come to the dark side, dude. We have a secret limited edition stash, I can hook you up.”

The Suit’s eyes light up and Harvey will never admit it, but he maybe gasps at the idea that there is even more to discover of his treasure trove.

“Don’t call me ‘dude’, my name is Harvey.”

“Nice to meet you, Harvey.”

And the name feels right, tastes warm and smooth on Mike’s tongue.

“You really like this kind of music?”

“For the right kind of mood, sure. You should give it a chance.”

“Maybe I should.”

While Harvey wanders tonight, Mike has time to dig his copy of ‘xx’ out of the staff pile. He slips it into a paper bag with Harvey’s choice for this evening - a limited extended play pressing of ‘The Big Come Up’ by The Black Keys.

Hours later when Harvey finds it, he smiles and listens to it while he strips out of his suit and settles in for the evening.

Hours and three hundred and five seconds later, Harvey’s hands shake as he tries to work the knot in his tie open.

  
He sleeps better that night than he has in years, the record still playing. He dreams of being underwater, but not drowning. The pressure of the water a comfortable, soothing weight on him. He thinks he sees a familiar face reflected at the surface of the water, shining bright in the light of the sun. He forgets as soon as he blinks the sleep from his eyes the next morning, but all day long he moves through the rush, easy in his skin.

 

 

  
________________________________________________

 

 

 

  
Harvey tends to favor music that falls into one of two categories: soulful or haunting. He listens to a whole lot besides, and loves it as much, but the body of his music collection is made of those genres which aren’t really genres at all. He listens to soul and smooth jazz and the more fluid, soothing blues offerings when he feels himself begin to peel away from the world. When his tenuous at best ties to All Else pull too tight and start to fray. Soft strains calm him, gather him back together and give him the presence of mind to repair the damage. Al Green and Charles Bradley and The Reign of Kindo and Turin Breaks and Beach House and a hundred others besides. These are artists and groups that span five decades and twice as many genres, but they each in different ways have this effect on Harvey and strip away the layers of ‘here’ and ‘now’ and ‘this’ and ‘these’ and leave him somewhere quiet and easy, a place and time to rebuild.

The ‘haunting’ side of things is a bit more complicated. It’s never a specific genre, sometimes a specific artist (lately it’s been the Adolescents or Florence and the Machine or Placebo) but always something that lodges sharp under Harvey’s skin. Sometimes he just feels wrong and can’t quite put his finger on why exactly that is until he hears the reason from someone else, in something else.

Harvey never really planned to concentrate in these places, to build rooms for these things. He’s inclusive about music, doesn’t necessarily look for things he doesn’t want to see, but listens carefully and commits to anything that sees fit to find him and take him home. They find him in coffee shop soundtracks, through the tinkling strains of other people’s earbuds, in commercials and movies and more than once or twice or ten times in Mike’s evening reign over the Criminal Records store playlist.

There are days when nothing fits, when everything he tries is just a little bit off center, too tight to force. On those days, he makes sure he can get out to the record store. On those days, he treads water in the aisles for as long as it takes. There is a whiteboard hung high on the back wall of the store that lists every record that’s to be played there all day. Sometimes Harvey finds his fit there. More times, he finds it in it’s absence there. Sounds that he can tell from reading the board are not listed, maybe weren’t planned or aren’t sanctioned. On days like these, when Harvey listens carefully to lyrics and googles them on his phone as he walks through the store, he’ll look up at Mike, eyes finding the familiar set of his body wherever in the store it may be in that moment, and Harvey will feel … close. To Mike, who has without intent or knowledge before or after the fact helped Harvey find his way to something that not only makes him feel better, real-er, safer, _solid_ , but lead him there on a whole new path entirely. Sometimes Harvey will look at Mike, always looking somewhere else, and feel like he’s intruded. Like he’s taking something that hasn’t been offered. Sometimes he doesn’t buy those records, these songs, not that day. He sends Donna with a list, or orders the vinyl online and has it delivered to his apartment. Sometimes he needs it then, and goes home and buys digital copies to fill the void until he can hold it in his hands.

The largest secular bodies of his music tastes fall into those two categories - soulful or haunted. But Harvey fills the space and minutes between them with a thousand other things, a hundred other genres. They are his safeties, but Harvey has always favored the offense stacked approach.

 

 

_______________________________________________________

 

 

 

One night Harvey goes to Criminal Records and finds a small blonde woman sitting in Mike’s place behind the counter. She’s looking around the store, no hint of the practised ease in the position that Mike always sets with his slouch and his total disregard for those who don’t specifically ask for his help. It’s one of the things Harvey had first noticed about Mike - he didn’t bother anyone who didn’t want to be bothered. It suited Harvey that way, to have the store more or less to himself on quiet weekday nights when most people were too busy sluicing off the working day in their own way, in methods that did for them what music does for Harvey. Harvey had liked knowing that Mike was there if he needed him, but almost invisible otherwise.

These days he wanders back to Mike every twenty minutes or so, asking opinions, offering his own. He’s found that he rather prefers being bothered, if that’s what you want to call it.

He’s genuinely bothered though, to find this tiny female thing here instead of Mike.

She turns to look at him when he walks by the register, frown in place, and he spares a glance to her name tag - a paper sticker that says “Jenny” and has what he can barely decipher to be a very poorly drawn bunny rabbit next to it.

“You must be Harvey!” She’s very perky. And she apparently knows who he is.

“I am. And you are?”

She points at her name tag, proudly pinpointing the rabbit for some reason.

“I’m Jenny! I’m Mike’s roommate!”

‘Roommate’ is an interesting and infuriatingly ambiguous word, Harvey finds. This girl is gorgeous and even if her wide eyed enthusiasm seems like a lot of work to him, he supposes it’s the kind of quality younger men might appreciate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. She seems nice.

“Is Mike … he’s not here tonight?”

“He had something to do, but he asked me to give you this?”

Jenny reaches behind her and unearths a slim cd case from her bag. Harvey looks at it in his hands. The case is clear, and there’s a blank silver disc inside that says “A mix cd - To Harvey, on Tuesday, For Wednesday.” in large, spiked sharpie. There’s no track-listing in sight.

Harvey thanks Jenny and buys the first familiar LP he sees, a pressing of a Sly & The Family Stone record that he already has two copies of.

He asks Ray to play the cd on the ride home, but stops him roughly halfway through the first song and pockets the disc carefully, already knows from the opening bars of the first track that this mix was made with a specific setting in mind, that the ‘For Wednesday’ was an order of sorts.

Harvey goes home that night and nothing else he listens to really sticks, but he hadn’t expected it would. The cd burns hot in his pocket, feels heavier than it is in his hand as he pops it into the disk drive of his laptop and transfers it onto his itunes account to update his ipod with the mix he simply titles ‘M’.

 

 

 

__________________________________________________

 

 

  
Mike hadn’t had other plans that night. Jenny hadn’t even officially been on shift.

The thing is … Mike doesn’t know if he’s imagining it or not. He doesn’t know if he just made a fool of himself by making a mix cd for someone who didn’t ask for it, might not know how to hear it like Mike needs him to.

But Mike feels like Harvey gets it. He feels like sometimes as he discreetly watches him make his way through the store, he can actually _see_ Harvey … feel how Mike feels right then, listening to whatever they’re listening to, together for the shared space. Even when he can’t describe himself how it feels, he thinks he sees it in Harvey and it’s a kind of recognition and connection that makes the whole world seem impossibly endless and void except for them. Like the biggest thing in the known universe right then is this feeling that they share, spilling out between them - music the tide that drags them together like moons.

That’s how it feels, and it’s bigger and more than anything Mike has ever felt before, but he doesn’t know that he isn’t just imagining it, isn’t simply desperate to let himself believe in it.

But he has nothing to lose, he figures. He’s never been afraid to try, even in the face of certain failure. It’s as much about true expression as it is about the outcome, maybe moreso, on occasion.

And so Mike makes Harvey a mix. And then he chickens out of giving it to him himself, and hides in the stock room all evening, picking up the stock-take that they’ve all been putting off for weeks.

He comes out just before they close, and tries not to blush when Jenny grins at him, tells him his ‘boyfriend’ says hello and thank you for the mix. He’s quiet for the rest of the night, but Jenny doesn’t push him. She knows how shaken he sometimes is, knows how huge a deal it is for someone like Mike, who feels the way he does about music, to craft it together and give it away like that. They get sushi for dinner and when they get home Jenny disappears into her room and Mike can hear her on the phone. He goes to his own room and lays down across his covers, reaches above his head to unhook his headphones and flip the switch on his turntable, plays the record he’d been listening to that afternoon before he’d left for work. He lies with his eyes closed and kicks his shoes off and listens to Ray LaMontagne, who always manages to make him feel both stripped raw and sure and safe. Like he’s willingly pulled his ribs apart to show someone he trusts what’s inside.

It’s pre-emptive.

The mix wasn’t about him.

Not really.

 

 

 

__________________________________________

 

 

 **{Mix 1}**

 **  
**

****

____________________________________________

 

 

  
Harvey listens to it the next morning. He walks to work to do so. It’s a mild September morning and he takes his time, lets the music in his ears pace his feet against the pavement.

His heart thuds in his chest in time with the first song, a fiercely quiet song about wanting to be alone that slips into a desperate jangle of frayed loneliness, the desperate reality of … Harvey’s reality.

Then soothing swells of violin. Still laced with regret, but soft and resigned now.

A march to that sense of resignation. A ‘this is how it is and it’s not always right, but that’s okay’. Acceptance.

The fourth song feels like it might choke Harvey. It’s a clear continuation of the message and tide of the mix but rising up into desperate hope now, paced and set to build. Driven to it. Harvey hears “it’s thunder - and it’s lightening - and the whole thing’s just frightening - I could barely see outside” and knows that Mike knows what it is to feel trapped with yourself, afraid you’ll one day get lost in the center of your own feelings. The gentle xylophone fuels everything, sets a quiet fire.

The next song is sharper, smarter, vicious. It sounds like lashing out.

The one after is a further push to that, but it’s reigned in. A greater focused forced.

And then hope. Furious, channeled hope. Harvey listens to the seventh song and feels his smile sink sharp to his bones.

The eighth takes his breath away again. Takes the weight of what he’d thought he’d understood Mike to be saying and scatters it like ashes on the wind. The song slips inside his skin like a whisper. And then it reaches it’s crescendo and buries itself in his heart, wraps tight up around his throat.

The ninth and final song sounds like a beginning. Like the destroyed remains of before, broken down to be built up into something else entirely. It says that just because something wasn’t always beautiful, wasn’t created to be that way, doesn’t mean it never can. It speaks to Harvey about the perfection of unified destruction. To destroy to rebuild. To start all over, to be more. The need to break something to make it better. The necessity of dying.

The mix is …. understanding. He thinks. He listens to it and hears ‘this is how you feel and this is how I know you feel because I feel it too’.

Mike understands. Harvey hopes.

 

 

  
_____________________________________

 

 

 

  
Music is not Harvey’s entire world. He lives in this one and he thrives in it. He moves easily through this life, carving his path with diligence and capability that cut through the weak willed, soft hearted mass around him with ease and without doubt. Harvey doesn’t dislike his life, he doesn’t think less of people who don’t see things the way he does. He just knows he is different. He was made to work differently. If he hadn’t found music …. he wouldn’t work at all.

Music is where he makes sense. Where he feels supported and challenged and _equal_.

Harvey has had relationships, friendships, brief moments of accidental understanding with people who have tried so hard to see it. Who tried to talk to him about music, who looked through his record collection like it was something to be studied and _learned_. It was nice to know that they cared enough to try, but ultimately it never works, because that’s not how it works.

It’s not about talking about it, or explaining it. Listening to someone else’s feelings and doing your best to see where they’re coming from, listening to a record for a second time with an aim, an end in mind. It can’t be shown, it can’t be forced, it can’t be given. It’s not discussion.

It’s simply there.

Harvey had begun to suspect that it wasn’t, though. That it was only in him, like this. That he could never fit to someone else in it.

And now it seems like Mike has been there all along, waiting.

Music isn’t somewhere Harvey goes to hide from life. It’s not what he could or would ever choose over All Else. But it is In All. It is the end and the beginning of everything Harvey does. It’s not an effort or an inclusion, it’s simple comprehension. This is how it feels for him to work.

He can’t even begin to imagine what it might be like to work in tandem. To work alongside someone else. To feel how he feels and have that work without questions that can’t be answered or acceptance that can’t come from patience, effort.

Harvey never imagined that that might be something he would get to experience, not after years of failed attempts to find it, to make it fit. He’d resigned himself to the fact that he was simply going to have to find something that almost worked, was waiting for an almost, a near thing, because it seemed like that would be the best he could hope for.

And it’s not like one mix cd has shaken him to his core.

This is just tremors, he tells himself.

It might be the best this could be, as big as it’s going to get. And that’s fine, that’s something. It’s more than he’s found before and it’s worth holding onto.

But it could also be a lead up. A preview. A warning mark. Forewarning to prepare for something worth holding out for.

 

 

  
____________________________________________

 

 

 

Mike is back at work the next evening. And this is twice this month that Harvey has come in two nights in a row.

Mike’s sitting on the floor in front of the raised register area with his back against the front of it. He’s wearing fraying, well worn jeans that are tight enough to warrant being called ‘skinny’, Harvey thinks, and a long sleeved tshirt underneath another - this one solemnly declaring that Mike ‘listens to bands that don’t even exist yet’.

“I didn’t take you for a hipster, Mike.”

He looks up at Harvey from the floor, drops the sheaf of paper he’d been looking through down beside him and crosses his arms over his chest, crosses one ankle over the other, leans back and settles in for their conversation tonight. His head goes back against the front of the register stand so he can look up at Harvey, standing over him at his feet and it gives Harvey this brand new view of the stretch of his neck, his throat working when he swallows. It distracts him.

“I didn’t take you for someone who’d know the word ‘hipster’, Harvey.”

And Mike is teasing him, saying his name with a kind of pointed emphasis that Harvey finds he really, really likes.

“What can I say, venturing into certain corners of the internet for music sometimes means I learn things I never wanted to know. Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m a n00b.”

Mike laughs, warm and bright and everything he says and does feels right to Harvey, feels like it fits in ways that only songs have ever sunk home for him before. It feels familiar.

“You’re not old! You’re only eleven years older than me!”

“Am I really!? And that’s not old?”

“Depends on the context, I guess.”

Is Mike flirting with him here, or is that just wishful thinking?

“So what brings you here tonight, Mr. Specter?”

“I’m not looking for anything in particular, there’s nothing I need right now.”

And Harvey knows Mike will understand exactly what he means by that and relief, flushed full with something else, something more and leaning, pushes the feeling further, deeper.

“Also - I don’t recall telling you my full name.”

Mike holds a hand up to Harvey and Harvey takes it, helps Mike up off the floor so he can stand in front of him, leaning down to brush nonexistent dust from his jeans while Harvey pretends not to notice the frisson of warm shock still tingling in his fingers where their hands had touched. When Mike straightens up again, they’re just a fraction too close, too clear when Harvey looks into Mike’s eyes and sees nothing but mirrored, welcoming recognition.

“You’re not the only one proficient with google, Harvey.”

And then Mike is walking away, striding back behind the counter and leaving Harvey to not look at his ass, no way. The smile Mike gives him when he rounds the desk and captures his gaze again says he doesn’t mind at all.

The song [changes](%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfIUQYlmOeY%E2%80%9D) and Harvey blinks.

“The [original version](%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wOaaBCYRVg%E2%80%9D) was so much better.” He says over his shoulder as he heads down into the aisles.

Mike’s smile changes, turns into a challenge, and he reaches over to press some buttons and turn the volume up.

Harvey looks up to catch his eye when the song ends and tips his head, concedes.

It’s been so long since someone was able to change Harvey’s mind about a song that he can’t honestly remember the last time it happened. It’s not a debate, not even a discussion. Just Harvey trusting Mike’s word enough to listen, and hearing exactly what he means, seeing what Mike sees. It’s a kind of convergence that’s completely new and utterly familiar to Harvey. It’s Mike’s impression of this music in Harvey’s mind, a sound and feeling that they now share.

Harvey picks up the record the song is from and takes it to the counter, takes the chance tonight and presses.

“That mix was ….”

And Mike looks up sharply, surprised, like he forgot all about it. Like maybe it wasn’t even on his mind anymore, was an end and not a beginning at all. But he doesn’t look away and a tremor runs through the hand that reaches for ‘Freaky Styley’.

Harvey presses till it hurts.

“I heard it. I hear it.”

And Mike grins so wide Harvey is momentarily worried that he’s going to hurt himself. Knows he could absolutely hurt Harvey if he keeps looking at him like that.

“You do?”

And it’s not a question, not really.

Mike hands him his record and they smile at one another for just a beat too long before Harvey turns to leave.

As he reaches the front of the store he hears the song that’s playing being cut off halfway through because Mike is changing it prematurely and he pauses at the door to listen.

[“ _Yeah, there’s something in the air, cus I’ve been dreaming we could be the fire for this night._ ”](%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baDncBFyCDU%E2%80%9D)

It isn’t a song Harvey knows, but it’s what he feels, and maybe nothing about this song is premature at all.

 

 

_____________________________________

 

 

  
Music isn’t so complicated for Mike. Maybe it’s the generational difference, or the social setting, or how they were raised, but it was easy for Mike to built a life around music. He listened to everything his parents played as he grew up, listened to everything his older sister played before _she_ grew up, and then spent the latter half of his teens coasting through school so he could keep his attention where it counted - on finding new music. Since then, not much has changed. He feels no real pressure to do anything ‘big’ or ‘bold’ or safe. He has what he needs and he seeks to stay there. He’s capable of more, much much much more, and plenty of people know it, more besides try to use it. He hasn’t yet found a way to make how he is have an impact on who he is, and he’s not always entirely sure he wants to allow the two to meet. He calls up what Jenny refers to as his ‘sonic brain boom’ when it suits him, when he wants to, but he’s never really found he’s needed to. It’s useful in some sense, he is a literal walking catalogue for the store and everything he’s ever read about music, but that’s surface detail. Inaccessible, irrelevant fact that doesn’t tell him anything about what he hears and feels. It’s useful to others, not him.

Music for Mike is harder to commit to, harder to get a solid grip on, harder to keep defined and separate and safe - tangible, clear weight.

But it’s hard to quantify a constant. It’s difficult to put boundaries on something that can’t be clearly distinguished and set _apart_. It’s near impossible to easily manage a commitment that can never be set aside.

Maybe the internet drives that further, changes the context and immediate scope of music for Mike. Makes music more accessible, always readily available and on hand in Mike’s life. It’s not a struggle for him, nothing he has to justify or explain away. It’s acceptable, to a greater extent than Harvey will ever know, for him to forge a life with it, if not through it.

Music is more daunting for Mike than it ever could be for Harvey. Sometimes too much for him, a painful aching reminder that he can’t catalogue what he hears. That’s not a concern for Harvey. It’s a constant crushing defeat for Mike.

He tries not to think about it too much, tries to keep his knowledge and his clean information as far from one another as he can.

He finds it frustrating, never being able to bridge the gap. He feels like he’s falling away from either side, sometimes. Being pulled up into something he can’t see and falling fast into something he can’t control.

He feels lost in both and sure in neither, sometimes. Everything he reads and remembers is clear, thin, absolute and ordered.

  
Black text on a white page.

  
What he hears and feels is the exact opposite, the inverted, tangled mess of nothing he knows how to describe.

  
His heart in sanguine oscillation.

 

 

_________________________________________

 

 

 **{Mix 2}**

 

 **  
**

__________________________________________

 

 

  
# 1 {Empires ; Strangers}

 

Harvey rarely keeps his earbuds in after he crosses the threshold into Criminal Records. It takes a minute, sometimes ten, to clear his head when he transitions from the sounds there to the sounds out here and to drag his consciousness in after him.

Today he keeps them in until he gets to the register after browsing aimlessly for almost forty minutes. He doesn’t notice Mike eye him, considering, when Harvey walks in, he doesn’t notice Mike at all until he’s paying for his purchase - a Feist record today. He’d heard a song of hers in Starbucks of all places and found it still lingering when he’d gotten home, long after he’d licked away the sugary sweet aftertaste of his vanilla cappuccino.

“Vanilla cappuccino? Really? I would definitely have thought of you as the americano kind.”

Harvey hadn’t noticed the level of detail he’d gone into in answering Mike’s ‘So where did you find this one?’ query. He was still a little lost in the inbetween, the sound of the song he’s been listening to on repeat for the past three hours still flooding on through his earbuds where they hang around his neck.

“Everything should be vanilla flavored. It’s the best taste.”

Mike’s laughing at Harvey but it’s light and easy and Harvey is having trouble thinking coherently, making words fit unshaped thoughts.

“I’ll take your word for it. What are you listening to tonight? I’ve never seen you with earbuds before, I also thought of you as the classically trained music listener, totally against the evils of modern technology and shit.”

Harvey is still blunt, open and clear in translation.

“It feels closer. I’m listening to this one song that I didn’t even know I needed until shuffle offered it up and it refused to leave. Do you spend a lot of time forming inductive opinion on all your customers or am I special?”

Mike ignores the question, doesn’t answer the obvious, and leans over into Harvey’s bubble of other space and plucks up an earbud, his fingers warm through Harvey’s shirt and solid shocking contact to here and now, an external exertion of connection that Harvey’s never known before.

The song starts over as Mike listens and he’s frowning by the time it ends, hands still where they’d fallen heavy on the counter somewhere around the swell of the intro. It changes when he lets the earbud fall back against Harvey’s chest, sets like an answer across his mouth and he isn’t looking at Harvey when he speaks.

“That’s …. kind of painful.”

“It … it doesn’t have to be. I hear hope in it, sometimes.”

“Underneath the desperation?”

“In the desperation. It’s not .. it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, to need.”

And Mike looks up at that.

“But he never says that it’s returned. He says he’s not enough.”

It sounds like a statement but it feels like a question.

“Maybe he isn’t referring to what you think he is.”

“What do you think he means?”

“I think he means … he’s there. He’s in it, no matter how it ends. He’s sure. He knows what he wants and what he needs and where he fits in that and isn’t that all we can ever know? You’ve got to trust the rest. You can’t predict it. He never says that the worst is likely, that it’s the reality. He just says that even if it is, that doesn’t change how he feels, because maybe that’s bigger than context.”

“You don’t just hear a song about an unrequited crush?”

“I don’t. And you don’t either.”

And Harvey knows that’s true, knows it like he knows the way Mike says his name a little softer than every other word against it, knows it’s hushed with caution and something else neither of them are ready to put a name on.

Mike smiles and it’s a knot unravelled, another piece of the puzzle falling into place.

 

 

  
_______________________________________

 

 

# 2 {Modest Mouse ; Satin In A Coffin} # 3 {Ratatat ; Nostrand}

 

 

  
Harvey knows from the force of volume that greets him two nights later that Mike is alone in the store, free from adult supervision.

‘Are you dead or are you sleeping? God I sure hope you are dead!’

He’s also, apparently, livid.

When Harvey comes up to the counter, Mike is slumped forward across the desk, beating the palms of his hands against the sides of the register in time with the song, hard and sharp and frustrated.

Harvey doesn’t see him take a breath as he approaches, until he’s standing before him and Mike looks up, recognition dawning bright and weary as his shoulders slump further, chest falling in a bone deep sigh.

“Hey.”

“Bad day?”

“Not bad, just … not good. Neither. Nothing.”

And Harvey knows how that feels.

He covers one of Mike’s hands with his own, pushes it flat and still.

“Come on.”

And Mike does. He gets up and follows Harvey upstairs, up to the sound proofed preview booths. He takes the headphones Harvey hands him and sinks down onto the bench, waits in silence while Harvey picks up a second set, connects both to a splitter he’s taken to carrying in his jacket pocket, heavy and hot against his chest all day. He sits down on the floor in front of Mike, back against the wall of the booth and his knees drawn up in the space between them and he scrolls through his ipod to get to what he’s looking for.

It seeps through the headphones, slow and steady into their ears and beyond, out to fill the space around them, thick and heady in the tiny room, welcomed pressure.

It builds and it takes them with it and they don’t look at one another until it throws them from that height at the 1:51 mark, and then they’re grinning, Harvey mirroring what he sees when he looks up at Mike, because he was waiting, wishing and there it is. He’s found him, brought him back.

They listen to it six more times, looking at each other, looking up at the ceiling in wonder, eyes closed in awe.

Harvey stays another hour, coming to Mike’s side at times, Mike seeking him out in the aisles in between. They speak to one another quietly, barely above a whisper, and Mike leaves the sound system in the store on standby the whole time, the silence tender around them.

As Harvey walks home he realizes he hasn’t got a clue what they spoke about tonight, couldn’t recall a single word if he were under oath. He doesn’t mind and it’s not important. All he thinks of then is how Mike says his name. Not cautious, not tentative, not scared like he’d thought. But hushed in reverence, like the whisper of the pads of his fingers over the lips of records that feel like friends. Quiet and full with wonder.

 

 

  
____________________________________________

 

 

# 4 {Empires ; Voodooized}

 

 

  
Then it’s Mike’s turn to lead, to push.

He says it with a song, says it for only them to hear, with a song that lays it all out between them like a challenge, a costly invitation to hear his admission.

He plays it at the end of their part of the night, just before Harvey leaves and Mike goes back to now.

He looks at Harvey as it plays and it’s like seeing inside Mike’s head, his heart. He looks at Harvey and his eyes are wide and his hands are restless and he looks wild, almost feral. Whatever they’re doing, whatever they’re circling, it’s real and it’s raw and it skitters across his skin in hot charges when they’re here like this, together, when he’s at home alone at night and hearing how he feels. So he says it, the only way he knows how.

And Harvey listens.

And before he turns to leave, Harvey reaches out, cuts through the straining space between them and curls his hand around Mike’s wrist, fingers tight to band along the delicate skin and bone and his thumb smearing a slow molten wake of fissures across the thin skin holding Mike’s pulse.

Mike is breaking apart, slowly but surely and Harvey is here. Harvey is there to shake him free.

 

 

________________________________________

 

 

# 5 {Animal Collective ; Did You See The Words}

 

 

  
Harvey emails it to him that night when he gets home. No message or words, just the attached music file and the subject field filled with a simple ‘Me too’.

It swims through Mike’s head, soothes the burn and licks at old scars he’d forgotten he had.

It’s brash and joyous and vast, a marching band in his chest, beating declaration in its wake.

 

 

  
_____________________________________________

 

  
# 6 {Wild Beasts ; Two Dancers II}

 

 

This is what they listen to the next time they meet, Harvey joining Mike at the foot of the stairs.

And it’s like feeling rain from the inside out, chiming guitar plopping fat drops against the hollow of his ribcage, weighted beats against his heart.

Harvey sits beside Mike, doesn’t say a word. Sits beside him and just listens, sits right there next to him as they hear.

They rise together when the song ends and it’s upside down, it’s inverted. They’re not rising back up into the world, they’re falling from it. Cupped hands full of warm, heavy run-off parted over this, opened wide to spill them out, rain them down into this. It should be distance. It should feel like leaving, splitting from - apart and away. Instead, it feels like assertion.

They rise and part and take different directions, Mike back to the register and Harvey taking the stairs upwards and away. But not really away at all. It still pulls and crosses between them, around them. Different directions but not opposite, not apart. Away in relation, together beyond the immediate, the irrelevant.

Combined, sure advancement. _Them_ , from here.

 

 

 

 

 

  
_____________________________________

  
THE END.  
For now.

_____________________________________________________________


End file.
